00:00Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Morelli, for the invitation.
00:04It's great to be back here in the intimate quarters of the House Administration Committee.
00:11The hearing is called Preventing Fraudulent Donations, Transparency, Verification, and Accountability.
00:19That sounds like a valuable inquiry to me.
00:22The problem is that, as we all know, that's not what the hearing is really about.
00:25If it were, our colleagues would have first demanded testimony from the CEO of WinRed,
00:31the fundraising platform that has generated hundreds and hundreds of serious fraud complaints
00:37from individual Americans, mostly Republicans, including a lot of elderly Americans and Americans with disabilities,
00:44who say they've been robbed blind, hoodwinked by WinRed, in many cases fleeced out of their life savings.
00:53But the Republican chairs of our three committees have repeatedly refused to conduct any oversight
00:58or investigation into the WinRed platform that processes donations for over 7,800 GOP campaigns
01:05and committees across the United States, including all the GOP senators and 97% of GOP House members.
01:12Well, that's just not a serious approach to the problem.
01:15This hearing is really part of a political vengeance and vendetta campaign that yesterday came to the House Judiciary Committee
01:23in the form of a four-hour hearing interrogating the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
01:31After the 2020 election, banks and credit card issuers estimated that WinRed fraud cases
01:36constituted as much as 3% of their total national fraud workload across all transactions.
01:44That is a shockingly large share, given that there are 150 million credit card transactions
01:51that American consumers and businesses engage in every single day in the country.
01:55Between January 2022 and June 2024, the FTC received more than 800 complaints about WinRed,
02:03nearly seven times the number it got about ActBlue.
02:07In the final months of 2020 alone, the Trump campaign, RNC, and their shared accounts
02:11had to issue more than 530,000 refunds worth more than $64 million.
02:19That's more than 11 times the amount that the Biden campaign and the Democratic committees had to refund.
02:25And yet, who of the administration and our GOP colleagues focused on exclusively from the beginning?
02:32ActBlue, the company that primarily processes contributions for Democratic campaigns around the country.
02:39Last April, the White House issued a presidential memorandum directing the AG and Treasury to, quote,
02:44use all lawful authority to investigate ActBlue, which, according to the White House,
02:49facilitated straw or dummy contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees.
02:55But as Americans can see each day, every accusation by this administration is an admission.
03:02Every allegation, a confession.
03:05Every charge, a self-indictment.
03:08The arraignment of ActBlue is an admission about WinRed's continuing serious fraud against their donors.
03:16An Associated Press review of President Trump's political committees found more than 1,600 contributions
03:23from unverified donors who lived abroad, had close ties to foreign interests, or failed to disclose basic identifying information.
03:32Many of those contributions came through WinRed.
03:35AP reported that one Chinese businessman gave $5,000 to Trump through WinRed while listing a La Quinta Inn as
03:43his home address.
03:44Other contributions came from unnamed donors listing 999 Anonymous Drive as their address.
03:51Another series of WinRed contributions listed the donor's address as a vacant building in Washington that turned out to be
03:58a defunct funeral home.
04:00Where is all of the righteous outrage about these abuses?
04:05Where is the mobilization of taxpayer resources to investigate WinRed?
04:11Where is Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives for bribery, securities fraud, abuse
04:20of office, and obstruction of justice?
04:23Attorney General Paxton sued ActBlue in April, but his office has ignored complaint after complaint from Texas constituents
04:30about the allegations of fraud and abuse related to WinRed.
04:35Who were the victims of WinRed that Ken Paxton deliberately ignores?
04:41Well, one Texas woman tried to make small one-time contributions to Republican candidates that she supported.
04:49WinRed emptied more than $15,000 out of her bank account, including charging her account 29 times in one day.
04:58She wrote to Attorney General Paxton that she, quote,
05:02didn't realize they were sucking my life savings out of my bank account.
05:07He never even wrote her back.
05:09And if that's how partisan Republicans treat Republicans,
05:13you can imagine how they're going to treat everybody else in the country.
05:18You don't want me to discuss these other complainants?
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